TapCritic – Honest iPhone and iPod Touch App Reviews

So, as you may have guessed, we here at TapCritic use Wordpress to help us deliver our kick-ass content and unintelligible ramblings.  It’s a thing of beauty, formatting posts perfectly and taking all the back-end guess work out of blogging.

But you aren’t limited to spewing your thoughts just when around a laptop or PC.  No, now you can take your ramblings on the road with Wordpress for the iPhone from Automattic, Inc.

Now, up until today I was ready to hack this app to pieces (review wise) due to a few quirks that made it all but unusable for me, but lo and behold, there has been a WordPress update, and it fixed a few of my bigger issues.

So, for the uninitiated, what is WordPress?  It’s blogging software that allows you to post articles quickly and easily.  You set up a WordPress theme and program the site to handle your content however you’d like, then you log into your WordPress account and go.  All you have to do it worry about writing content and your fancy WordPress setup publishes the articles and makes sure they are formatted correctly, filed correctly, and managed correctly.

Using the WordPress web login on the phone, though, is almost impossible.  Now there is this app for easy, quick blogging on the go.

Now, it should be noted that this is for quick, simple posts.  If your blog is fancy with lots of pictures, “more” tags, excerpts and custom images, then this iPhone app will only take you so far.  Even for a site like TapCritic, though, this app has its uses.

Setting up your accounts is simple and easy, and you can set up multiple different sites as long as you have a WordPress install on all your servers.

Once you are into the app, you will see the past ten posts on the site.  Now you can go in and change them just like on a real computer.  You can change titles and categories and tags and even the publish date.  Nice.

There are a few things missing though.  If your site is excerpt dependent, this won’t work for you.  Also, you can’t look at things in both HTML and visual mode–it’s all HTML.  I would love to have a toggle switch to move between the two.

You can also create a post from scratch.  If you want to do fancy things like insert a “more” tag, which most blogs use heavily, you will need to study up on your HTML.  A bunch of other features are missing, too.  I would love to see an update in the future that allows more complicated coding without needing to know HTML.  Maybe just a pop-up menu with a wheel of options?  I’ve seen it done on other apps handling complicated interfaces.

One cool thing, though, is that you CAN add images from your photo library.  Wanna pull an image from a site?  You better have your HTML ready and a pen to write down the URL.  Jesus, I’ll be glad when we get the 3.0 software on these phones with cut-and-paste functionality.

The images, though, are not as customizable as on the original site.  You can’t change justification or even choose placement within the article.  All images are inserted at the bottom of an article.

Like I said, this is for simple blog sites…text only or non-image dependent.  This means its all but impossible for me to do an entire TapCritic post through this app.  So what is it good for?  Well, two things.

First, if you are a news oriented site it’s a great way to quickly upload news stories.  You can even add a picture at the bottom of the post to show what you’re talking about.  This is pretty neat if you’re blogging about a conference or press-related event.

Also, this app is GREAT for fixing typos.  Say you can’t remember if you referenced the right app developer in your app review.  You’re at a bar and it’s driving you crazy.  Pull this bad boy out and double check.  Change any problems you find on the spot.

Then everyone laughs at you for playing with your iPhone in a bar.  Small price to pay.

Overall, this app is pretty darn good and on its way to being great.  If they can figure out how to squeeze in a few more features and formatting options, this will change the face of modern blogging.

Oh, and did I mention the preview button?  That’s right.  Live previews of your post over 3G and edge.  A life saver.

You can get the WordPress app for free HERE.

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3. iPhone 3G vs. iPhone 3GS – The S really does stand for speed.
4. BlogPress – A mobile bloggin’ dream.